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Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.
I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.
Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.
I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.
Yes and I think the 20th century showed us that the right sort of ideology can persist despite the megadeaths stacking up due to their mismanagement. I suppose the good news is 21st century Americans are more pampered and disobedient than mid-century Soviets and Chinese communists. So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner. One can hope.
Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.
The topic under discussion is policies so bad that the bodies are piling up. Neither Vermont nor South Carolina are currently suffering from some Great Leap Forward style policy disaster.
Whatever complaints I have about American progressives, they aren't racking up megadeaths like communists. But if somehow they or their conservative opponents did, I would hope Americans are less obedient than Soviet peasants and don't passively go along with ruinous policy.
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